11/8/17

i have it set up today such that i don't need to leave my apartment. i don't even need to unlock my front door. "set up" doesn't seem like the right phrase... "arranged"... i don't know. i accomplished a set of tasks yesterday. i have nothing "on my plate" today

i briefly forgot that the spray function on kitchen sinks isn't something we don't have anymore. i just haven't seen one in such a long time. like garbage disposals, these things seem to have disappeared from my life. i moved to new york eight years ago for college. i listened to broken social scene a lot back then. i don't know if it's that i don't see these middle class accoutrements because i've lived in old apartments without state of the art appliances, or because i've actively rejected them. i remember the way they looked in the nineties, the sprayer things. the one in my parents' house ran on a coil, separate from the faucet, and you held it in your hand like a hairdryer or a gun

in december 2009, i remember walking around in the snow, on fifth avenue, crying and talking to myself, listening to "glue" by neutral milk hotel. on my birthday, i watched ufo conspiracy videos on youtube

it was fun to be a teenager, but i wouldn't want to be one again. lately i've noticed i can become fairly monotone. i feel like this is learned behavior. or maybe part of the resignation of aging. i feel like i had to actively try to be monotone when i was a teenager, against my better instincts of, like, expressiveness, loudness, excitability

for a long time i've wanted to appear, as well as seem, phlegmatic, but inside i am typically raging. and raging in a typical way

i voted yesterday. i didn't feel moved by any of the things i voted for, but i like to vote because i'm afraid if i shirk the privilege, and everyone else also, unwittingly, shirks it, the government will observe this, and effectively take it away, or erode it even more than they already have for many demographics and individuals

last night, i asked zachary if he thought in like twenty-five years we'd look back on the bad things happening today, like mass shootings and trump and fake news and police brutality and rampant drug ods and people driving cars into crowds, and be like "damn, that was crazy, glad we moved past that" in the way that people sometimes talk about vietnam, civil rights, nixon, plane hijackings and other more-defunct forms of terrorism, crack, aids, inner-city crime, etc. he said "no" and that he thinks we're living in "end times"

earlier this year, i became convinced that trump (with plummeting approval ratings, and with the impending possibility of an impeachment) or trump-adjacent people would stage a military coup, attempting to take over new york. it seemed viable because we are a mass of people, mostly unarmed, mostly left-leaning, isolated and coastal, that could be seized through a series of lateral, tactical sweeps. mostly i was stoned when i thought about this stuff, and i was also able to convince myself that they'd start this military operation by landing on the southern-most point of the city, setting up a military base on coney island, emptying apartments, driving tanks through the streets and marching civilians to what end i didn't know. i felt, as i would often eat an edible and reel in bed for an hour or so worrying, hearing helicopters and phantom sounds of turmoil, that if they came for me, i'd be too stoned and unstable to comply, and would be executed in my doorway. i would put the chain lock in place and try to weigh the cost-benefits of being killed. i like to think of myself as someone who'd try to survive a situation like that, but, as i discussed with my therapist, in the same way many writers and artists must fail for one or two to come to embody the zeitgeist, or many people must remain in poverty for there to be wealthy, healthy people in society (at least under contemporary structures of society) (this is abysmal, but feels increasingly insoluble/undeniable), a lot of people have to die in conflicts like this, and maybe i'd just have to be one of them. hard to say if i'd have had the fortitude or quick thinking to endure the holocaust. that said, if someone detonated a nuclear weapon in manhattan, because of where i live and work, most likely i'd survive

i asked zachary if he'd want to try to set a meeting place, since we're in walking distance of each other, if they dropped a bomb. he said if something like that happened, he'd want to just get high for a while before he took any actions

buying nikes, or really any particularly nice clothes or shoes or anything, for children is not good practice. it's not worth it

i've look at pictures of the windows the shooter broke in the mandalay bay hotel. they look very serene, uncanny against the rest of the building

it's eleven thirty-five a.m. there's a yellow glow against the whiteness of the sky, like it's going to go dark soon, suddenly. i don't know

lydia davis wrote "I like to see the sky in the late afternoon, especially in November, I like petting my cats, hearing their cries, and holding them."